Another Bailout Around the Corner ~ `The Hammer` Was Right!

Economic Laws

✿ “A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge”

{Editors note: this is how the USSR ended up with warehouses FULL of “widgets” (things made that it could not use or people did not want) no one needed in the real world. This “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it” (see below) enforcers George Gilders contention that when government supports a venture from failing, no information is gained in knowing if the program actually works.}

Via Gateway Pundit:

This come via the Weekly Standard, but note that Charles “the Hammer” Krauthammer predicted this at the end of last year:

Bailing Out Health Insurers and Helping Obamacare

Robert Laszewski—a prominent consultant to health insurance companies—recently wrote in a remarkably candid blog post that, while Obamacare is almost certain to cause insurance costs to skyrocket even higher than it already has, “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it.” How can this be? Because insurance companies won’t bear the cost of their own losses—at least not more than about a quarter of them. The other three-quarters will be borne by American taxpayers.
Obamacare

For some reason, President Obama hasn’t talked about this particular feature of his signature legislation. Indeed, it’s bad enough that Obamacare is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to funnel $1,071,000,000,000.00 (that’s $1.071 trillion) over the next decade (2014 to 2023) from American taxpayers, through Washington, to health insurance companies. It’s even worse that Obamacare is trying to coerce Americans into buying those same insurers’ product (although there are escape routes). It’s almost unbelievable that it will also subsidize those same insurers’ losses.

Here, US-RUSSIA talks about some of the key differences between the Russia of today and the USSR of yesteryear:

…But what Russia does not suffer from is what the Soviet Union suffered from: massive economic distortion through state subsidies and outright fiat. The Soviet Union’s policy to contain inflation was not to raise interest rates or limit bank lending but to make inflation illegal. Inflation was banned and prices on a host of important goods were frozen (consumers, of course, paid the increased cost through ever-more-pervasive shortages). The Soviet treatment of unemployment was similar. The Soviet Union sought to lower unemployment not through tax credits or through loose monetary policy but by making unemployment a crime and forcing enterprises to boost their payrolls. Stories abound of Soviet grocery stores that had  four different ticketing systems and ten different cashiers. This sort of inefficiency wasn’t some mysterious manifestation of eastern barbarism, it was an entirely predictable result of Soviet economic policy…

The question is, what is the healthiest direction/pulse of the nation to go? Making market “realities” a fiction, and artificially insulated from what the public wants… thus increasing the government’s involvement (increasing it’s growth and stripping away freedoms in order to artificially prop-up parts of the market) in our personal lives and restricting of choices? Or a free’er market which increases our freedoms and allows products and reforms to be MOST affected and guided by the people?


One last point, the most important. Unlike big business when it makes mistakes, big government cannot go out of business. Unlike corrupt government, corrupt business cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation’s currency. Businesses cannot coerce you by force (tax liens, garnishing of wages, or armed IRS officials, etc) into an action. So the “greed” of the corporation pales in comparison to the greed of government.[6] Which is why our Founders stated that, “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government” (Patrick Henry); “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master” (George Washington). (Read More)